What you need to know about retread truck tyres

The market for retreaded tyres for commercial vehicles has waxed and waned in recent years, partly due to the influx of cheap Chinese tyres – but now more operators are seeing the environmental as well as cost benefits of reusing casings to get the maximum life from the raw materials used in their manufacture.

If a casing or carcass has been well looked after and hasn’t been damaged or suffered a structural failure, why not use it again, after the tread has been regrooved and it has reached the end of its first life? Instead of extracting the raw materials needed for a completely new tyre, a retread product uses up to 70% less new material and so costs less and is better for the environment.

Retreading has been around for almost as long as pneumatic tyres themselves. When we looked at retread tyres a couple of years ago it was clear that Covid-19 and the influx of budget tyres that usually cannot be retreaded have shaken up the retread market. 

Measuring the size of the UK retread market as a proportion of new tyre sales is not an exact science. “It’s very difficult to put an exact percentage on this”, says Andrew French, business to business sales director for Michelin Tyres in the UK. “We would estimate retreads accounted for around 25% of the new tyre market in the UK last year – which was between 1.9 million and 2 million tyres. So we would estimate the retread market to be around half a million tyres last year. From a UK perspective, we think the retread market dropped a few percentage points in 2024 versus 2023. If you look at the European market since 2021, there has been around a 22% drop over a three- to four-year period, again impacted by the imports of single-life tyres.”

Darren Heywood, national account manager at Prometeon in the UK, puts the retread market slightly lower at around 20% to 25% of the new tyre market. James Davis, head of category for tyre management firm Tructyre, is of a similar view, suggesting the retread market in the UK represents some 20% of new tyres sold.

Although Tony Maillings, head of hot retread production EMEA and plant manager for ContiLifeCycle Ivybridge and Stöcken, won’t comment on the market percentages, he thinks that because fleet businesses have been a big retreading market historically in the UK, the behaviour of the fleet sector can determine buying patterns and that this is particularly important where factors like fuel efficiency are the priority.

“There are still large fleets within the UK that have a new and retread policy, so it’s still out there, but there are others that have maybe gone a new route, because they were hunting fuel efficiency rather than tyre life,” he says.

Like Maillings at ContiLifeCycle, Guy Heywood, vice-president of Hankook Tire Europe, sees fleet customers as the biggest users of retreads, although there are variations across Europe according to fleet size and the applications the vehicles are being used for.

“The highest usage of retread products is in fleets that have CPK/CPV [cost per kilometre/cost per vehicle] contracts with premium tyre makers,” he says. “Here we see retread levels of 40% to 50% of the tyres fitted. In the rest of the market, we see regional and on-/off-road application fleets using retread more than urban and long-haul fleets. We also see many large- and medium-sized fleets today that are not using retreads and are not regrooving their tyres.”

Heywood does not let tyre makers off the hook for the current low levels of retread use, pointing to “an inability of the industry to explain and sell the merits of retread tyres and to overcome some long-standing and frankly ill-informed views on the poor damage resistance from retreads or the questionable quality and safety of retread tyres”.

If that’s the picture for retreads, how does this compare with the uptake of budget tyres – singleuse tyres that cannot be retreaded – within the new tyre market? Most of the manufacturers we have spoken to agree that around 30% of new HGV tyres sold in the UK are budget brands. Tructyre and Michelin put the percentage higher – Tructyre at 38% and Michelin between 40% and 45%. 

Michelin’s French notes that some budget brands carry sidewall labelling to indicate that they can be retreaded, but he urges any retreader to be careful. “I would suggest all retreaders inspect them very carefully before retreading one of those tyres,” he warns.

“Many of these budget products claim to be retreadable and regroovable; however, we see very few, if any, are accepted by retread companies in Europe”, says Heywood at Hankook. “I have never seen a budget tyre regrooved in my time in tyres.”

Some experts in the industry have wondered why tyre producers might recommend retreads for drive and trailer axles, but not for steer axles. It’s a policy that Heywood at Prometeon challenges. “Retreads are fitted to steer axles in some cases, but not often,” he says. “They tend to be on domestic refuse and recycling collection vehicles. So next time you see a bin lorry, have a look at the steer axle tyre. It could say that it’s a retread. That’s because these are low-speed vehicles, and as you can imagine, all they’re doing is stop-and-start routes.”

All those CM has spoken to agree. “In my experience as a factory manager for a premium retread company and now as VP of Hankook Europe, a steer retread tyre has the same pre-production testing, production quality control and end-of-line testing as drive and trailer axle tyres,” says Heywood at Hankook. “In my view, a premium retread steer tyre has no more risk in use than a premium new tyre, so they can be used.”

“Technically, there isn’t an issue,” says Maillings at ContiLifeCycle. “But if everybody ran retreads all round, we’d run out of things to make retreads out of.” That’s a point that French at Michelin echoes. “In general, if we were managing a fleet as we do within Michelin, and I’m sure other premium manufacturers do as well, you’ll look at a retread rate of about 40%, so that’s a kind of optimum input of retreaded tyres into the overall fleet of tyres that you would introduce. You can’t have retreaded tyres across all axles of a fleet, because at some point you would run out of casings to retread.”

Most premium manufacturers prefer to use their own carcasses for their retreads, including Continental, Hankook, Michelin and Prometeon. Much of this work is done in the UK, with Continental operating a plant at Ivybridge in Devon, while Grantham-based retreader Vaculug works with Hankook and Prometeon to produce its Alphatread and Prometec retread brands.

Michelin’s plant in Stoke-on-Trent has been producing retreads since 1968 and globally the company recently celebrated a century of retreading

Since 2012, new tyres across the EU have been required to carry performance labelling to indicate levels of noise, braking on wet surfaces and rolling resistance. And since tyres are sold across a range of European markets, the UK benefits from the information too. A colour-coded traffic light system graded A to E indicates performance in terms of rolling resistance and wet grip, while noise is shown in decibels and graded A, B or C.

None of this is obligatory for retreaded tyres – at least, not yet – although in the EU there are plans to introduce similar labelling for retreads. It is not certain if that will also be applicable in the UK. “Every tyre would need to be tested – and then do you test every one with a different carcass?” is how Maillings at ContiLifeCycle sees the problem. “So it’s how you get to a label level which is much easier in a new tyre than it is in a retread. That’s really been the stumbling block in terms of getting this across the line. 

“We’ve produced a trailer tyre that carries a label, so we can do that today on one of our brands, but it’s just not a legal requirement. When it comes in the EU, we as a business will probably roll it out to the UK whether there’s a requirement or not, because I think it’s important for customers to know.”

Heywood at Hankook describes one particular problem that retread labelling would need to address: “In most independent retread companies, they will use multiple premium and Tier 2 tyre makers’ casings to make the same product. So the different casing designs and performance can mean the labels for two seemingly identical tyres are different because they use dissimilar casings to make each tyre.”

Fleets operating in and out of quarries, other on-/off-road sites and on heavy-duty operations offer a challenge to any tyre maker – new or retread. Some might choose the cheapest route – budget brand single-use tyres – while others might see retreads as a way of controlling their costs. How much is the risk of damage a deterrent to these fleets?

“Not at all,” says Davis at Tructyre. “The fitment of either new or retread is down to customer choice and really depends on the specific operation of the vehicles. Every customer fleet is different and has specific needs.”

Hankook’s Heywood sees these fleet customers as good retread customers because of the lower cost compared with new tyres – but that changed with the arrival of budget brands. Even though retread customers have reduced, he reckons retreads still account for 15% to 20% of sales with these customers.

“Many premium makers are making on-/off-road retreads, and the performance of these tyres is seen as being particularly good in terms of grip, mobility and most importantly damage resistance,” he argues. “Also, some of the independent retreaders [like Vaculug in the UK] designed and developed products for this segment with much more protection in the tread and the sidewalls. These tyres are seen to be more resistant to damage than singleuse products and so many fleets today are using them – even when the purchase cost is higher.”

 - This article was previously published in Commercial Motor, to subscribe see the latest Commercial Motor subscription offer